FOLLOW ACTION FREAKOUT: THE SEQUEL

Here’s a more advanced version of the beat variation workflow that this whole Follow Actions series started off with. Here’s we’ll get a little fancy with MIDI routing, both to make a point and also to get some nice easy to manage results.

After you’ve programmed your beats and set up the Follow Actions, duplicate the track.

Now, extract the chains from the duplicated track. My beat just has kick, clap and hat. So I’ll just extract the clap and the hat (and rename the Beat track to Kick.)

This is where things get interesting: I’m now going to delete the drum rack from the Kick, Clap and Hat tracks. These tracks now become raw MIDI tracks, allowing me to play with the MIDI routing:

Notice the MIDI To menu above (when MIDI tracks contain instruments, there’s an Audio To menu instead). Each of these tracks is now configured to send its MIDI into the original Drum Rack track (called “Beat”).

OK, why take all the extra trouble to do this? Read on in the next tip…